Mike Harris on Coaching High Performance Teams
April 28, 2010
Mike Harris Motivational Leadership Speaker
Motivational speaker Mike Harris is the founder and former CEO of First Direct bank and Egg.Com
He recently published an article in People Management magazine on Coaching High Performance Teams:-
I’ve created a few interesting businesses in my time. Three of them went on to be worth more than a billion pounds. The fundamental principle behind their success, I believe, was the creation of an environment designed to unleash the human spirit at work.
In some ways the approach – to liberate energy, creativity, innovation and commitment – was a reaction against traditional large organisations, where the fundamental principle seemed to be a nose-to-the-grindstone culture where people are invited to trade in their quality of life for career advancement. Let’s be clear – such businesses can produce high performance. I just wouldn’t want anyone who I care about to work for them.
With this in mind, whether in creating my own businesses or in applying the same principles to transforming large well-established businesses, I have always made extensive use of business coaches. This has, predominantly, been in the following three ways: First, to help people create motivating personal goals aligned with company goals. This includes helping them discover how they make decisions, how this habitual way of working sometimes helps them achieve their goals and sometimes gets in the way, and how to deal with problems and breakdowns. At its best this sort of coaching can give people a deep existential understanding of the way they are living their lives; at worst, it can provoke resistance and accusations of manipulation or irrelevance. It all depends on the quality and credibility of the coach.
Second, to facilitate meetings that focus on developing plans and strategies, dealing with urgent or intractable problems and/or serious brainstorming. Coaches who do a good job at this are usually highly valued and hard to find.
Third, to help develop a leadership team into a high-performance unit capable of building an extraordinary business or growing an existing business at extraordinary speed. I have only found a handful of people worldwide I would trust with this work.
To read the full article by Mike Harris click here.
